105. Repair and Maintenance of Media Technologies: A Hybrid Approach
Logan Brown, Indiana University; Marina Fontolan, Centro de Estudos em Ciência, Tecnologia, Cultura e Desarrollo, Universidad Nacional de Río Negro; Alexander John Daniel Mirowski, Indiana University
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol, Portuguese/Portugués
In recent years, STS scholars have turned away from tired narratives about technological progress and “innovation” in favor of the vital but overlooked work involved in the maintenance and repair of complex technological systems. By foregrounding the banal – even boring – work of maintenance and repair, scholars have revealed the quiet struggle against entropy that keeps our technology functional.
STS-focused investigations of maintenance and repair practices have centered on technologies and dynamics familiar to the field – transit systems and infrastructure in particular – whose social dimensions are less symbolic than embodied. This raises a crucial question: how do we as scholars of science and technology contend with the maintenance and repair of media technologies, whose symbolic dimension introduces new questions about the ends and means of maintenance and repair? Media technologies raise crucial questions for STS scholars, including issues of knowledge production, the visibility of labor, new ethical models, and overlooked patterns of innovation.
This panel seeks to promote reunion between two fields of study, bringing together questions central to STS inquiries into repair and maintenance practices with questions of power and communication central to Media Studies.
Themes explored in this panel might include:
Histories of labor in repair and maintenance practices
Sociotechnical hybridities of maintenance and repair
Ethics and care in maintenance- and repair-based labor
Preservation,conservation, and care of media artifacts
